


Land of Heat and Teamwork

by chronologicalimplosion



Category: Bee and PuppyCat, Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 03:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3103466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronologicalimplosion/pseuds/chronologicalimplosion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider returns home from an exhausting day of work to find a bizarre package sent to him by his bro. It flips things a little bit turnways.</p>
<p>This isn't strictly following the plot or set of character relationships from either Homestuck or Bee and Puppycat, but is more approximately a sort of bizarre mashup of elements from each reimagined into one universe starring characters from Homestuck. If you've read Homestuck but not seen Bee and Puppycat, you should be fine. The other way around, not so sure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Land of Heat and Teamwork

**Author's Note:**

> This is an inexcusably late present for [coffeecakey](http://coffeecakey.tumblr.com)'s secret santa, in which I am gifting coffeecakey. There are a number of reasons why it's late, one of which is just largely that _it got out of hand_. This is part one, which I'm publishing now because I want to have _something_ to give you before we're too far into the new year, even though it contains basically nothing you asked for and very little of what I originally planned yet (I promise, it'll get there).
> 
> Consider this episode one with an episode two on the way. Hopefully it will be here soon, and hopefully it will be much better. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Dave's plan once he got off work had been pretty standard: not much. Already work had pounded his aggressively poor posture into a somehow even worse submission, and the blistering Texan sun didn't help matters. The whole walk home he was about one heavy sigh away from kissing the pavement, at which point he'd probably just give up and curl into a ball on the sidewalk.

He knew the fridge was out of grown-up food, had left himself an obnoxious note on his iPhone and everything, but if he ate the last of the cereal for dinner with chocolate ice cream instead of milk, well, breakfast was for chumps anyways.

Actually, the more he thought about it, cereal and ice cream didn't actually sound that bad. Maybe he was onto something. The next big innovation in cereal and/or ice cream, waffle cone crunch Cheerios and/or sugarbran swirl Briar's.

As soon as he was in through the door, before his key card was even back in his pocket, the landlord shouted out into the lobby. "Hey, shitswipe!"

The comfortingly familiar cracking voice could really have been addressing anyone, but Dave turned anyway with a composed half-nod. "Yo, Kankles."

Karkat just scowled in response. "Some fuckbucket with a hole drilled in their head big enough to make them forget that you're a waste of everyone's precious time and air sent you a package. You better fucking pick it up before the colossally hideous lopsided cube taking up my precious desk space drives me crazy."

"No offense, dude, but I'm pretty sure it's too late for that. You took the penultimate triple-flip swandive right off the deep end way before I was ever graced with your symphonic lullaby of a voice."

“Just GET YOUR BONY, USELESS ASS OVER HERE AND GET YOUR BALLSDAMNED PACKAGE FROM BEHIND MY FUCKING SERVICE DESK!”

While Dave was signing the package log, his landlord found his slightly less enraged voice to ask, carefully constructed so as to throw off any suspicion of actual interest, “What’s in this ugly cardboard prison, anyway?”

“Dunno. Address that it came from is my bro’s. But it’s not like it’s my birthday or anything. It’s probably part of an elaborate plan to dispose of a body. His rival buttrumpus must’ve gone a little too far.”

When Dave handed over the clipboard, the scowl was firmly back in place to stare him down again, like a wet kitten trying to look menacing. “Get the hell out of my lobby.”

“Aww, does somebody have a hatecrush? Are you lashing out against this perfect face because you know you want a slice? Getting all tsundere on me? Gonna bake me some cookies and then make a big show about how it’s not because you care about me or anything, or are you more the type to just poison them? I must admit, Krusty Krab, your affections keep me on my toes.”

“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY LOBBY.”

With a satisfied smirk and the (indeed abnormally sized) package under his arm, Dave threw a half-assed salute and turned away. “As you wish, fuckass.”

“I swear to fuck, I say it one time…”

Dave didn’t catch any more of Karkat’s grumbles as the landlord vanished into his office and the first of oh-so-many steps reminded Dave just how tired he was of moving.

At least the package wasn’t heavy.

\---

Dave had a bowl of his cereal-ice cream monstrosity on his lap and all his limbs hooked around various parts of the couch like only the gangly-limbed can manage on a loveseat when somebody knocked on the door.

“Go away, I’m broke as shit and if you’re selling anything cool I’ll probably just steal it.”

“Dave, it’s me!”

“Oh, shit, it’s her majesty! I’d better get my ass off the couch post-haste.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, is the door unlocked or not?”

“You think I’d just suddenly start locking it? Jane, dearest, your expectations of me are way too high and I’m gonna need you to lower them posthaste. I wouldn’t even scrape the top of my finely-combed hair on those. We need, like, Japanese-hotel-level going on so I can get all nice and cozy up in here.”

With a prim sigh and a cluck of disapproval from Jane, the door creaked open and she walked in. She still had her apron on, her favorite red-orange Betty Crocker with a liberal coating of flour, and was working at balancing a cake between her free arm and her hip while she fumbled one-handedly with the door. “I baked a cake and I thought you might want a slice for dessert, but it seems like you’ve already got that covered.”

“What, this? No, this is dinner.”

Jane’s lips were pressed into a thin line and one eyebrow crept up slowly. “That is ice cream.”

“No, it’s cheerios.” Dave held a spoonful aloft to show her and then crammed it into his mouth.

“Then what do you call the clearly frozen, clearly chocolate-flavored dairy, Dave??”

He didn’t bother to swallow before replying “I was out of milk.”

Jane sighed and set the cake down on the coffee table. “Oh, for pete’s sake. Now give me that!” She swiped the bowl out of Dave’s hands despite his protests and sashayed off to his kitchen. When she walked back in, she picked up the cake and then stared at Dave pointedly. “Come on, up you get.”

“What? No! Get away from me, witch, I’m not interested in being dragged into your lair where you can fatten me up until I’m nice and edible.”

“Get your rear off that couch. I’m feeding you.”

“Alright, alright, _mom_. God.”

\---

Dave dropped his fork dramatically to his empty plate and actually bothered to chew and swallow before he turned to where Jane was rinsing out a cheese-sauce-covered pot. “I will never understand the magic you manage to work with hamburger helper. I almost don’t care that you’re just going to gobble me up once I’m too fat to run away.”

“I’d starve waiting for that to happen, you little stick. Out of all the steaks in the case, I’d never look at the little runt-of-the-litter Dave cut and think that was what I wanted to take home.”

“Oh wow, that’s harsh. You wound me so. My poor undernourished body will definitely bleed out within the hour.”

“Within the hour? Earlier you thought I was going to wait until I had something to gain from your gruesome murder. I must say, your diminishing faith in me is worrying.”

“Maybe I’m just trying to set a good example.” Dave slumped further into his chair as if to prove his point.

Jane rolled her eyes and grabbed his plate off the table to add it to the pile of dishes being rinsed. There was a brief moment of silence. “What was that weird box in your living room, anyways? You’d better not be buying dumb movie memorabilia again, Mister doesn’t-have-money-to-go-grocery-shopping.”

“Nah, this time I’m saving up my money so I can blow it all on shitty comic book memorabilia. I’m totally all about Spiderman all of a sudden, gonna buy a fucking fancy-ass webslinger so I can start saving the city from crime, antagonizing the local police, y’know.”

“But whoever would you kiss upside-down in the rain?” Jane turned off the water and moved to sit across from Dave at the table, chin in one hand feigning rapt attention.

“That comes after. Skinny dorks like me don’t get the girl when they’re just nobodies, they suddenly become attractive when they’ve saved your best friend’s life and are on the run from the police, but in a totally admirable way. People eat that shit up. Ladies will be all up in my web of their own accord.”

“But really, what is it?”

Dave shrugged and tried to brush off Jane’s obvious excitement. “I dunno, I haven’t opened it yet. My bro sent it to me out of the blue without any warning, so your guess is as good as mine.”

Jane immediately sat up straighter, eyes bright and the gears clearly turning in her head. “Ooo, what do you think it is, then? It could be anything in there! A care package because he knows you haven’t been eating well, a bunch of childhood mementos he suddenly found in the attic, or maybe it’s a box full of money because he suddenly came into an illicit fortune and wanted to share some of the spoils with his little bro.”

“Or maybe it’s literally just full of packing peanuts. We don’t even have an attic, I grew up in an apartment slightly shittier but slightly bigger than these ones. Jesus, if you’re gonna get all Nancy Drew on me we can just go open it.”

Jane’s eyes snapped back into focus on Dave and her brow furrowed, presented with two conflicting mysteries all of a sudden. “I’m… sorry, did you not want to open it?”

“Nah, it’s okay. I wasn’t gonna open it tonight because I was too tired, but I’m gonna have to at some point, so we might as well. Come on, let’s see if I won the big bro lottery.”

Soon enough, Dave and Jane were relocated back into Dave’s apartment, on either end of the tiny couch with the box just barely fitting on the couch space in-between them. Dave ran a pair of scissors under the miles of packing tape and was eventually greeted with a sea of slightly off-white foam.

“Were you pulling my leg about the packing peanuts, or do you really think this might be all?”

Dave plunged his arm in (and belatedly realized halfway in that Dirk was just the kind of person to ship a sword in the mail and he should probably be careful). “With my bro, who the fuck knows. It could be anything. Maybe it’s a toddler-sized katana, maybe it’s a very light mini fridge.” After a few seconds, his fingers clenched around something surprisingly plush, and… Jesus, maybe having Jane around for the unboxing wasn’t the best idea. But he was committed now, and Jane wouldn’t let it go lightly.

With little bits of styrofoam spilling out to burrow into the crevices of his couch and start styrofoam families, out came a bright red plush… alligator? Did Dirk send him a plush alligator? Did Dirk _make_ him a candy apple red plush alligator?

“Oh! Well, that’s certainly unexpected. Do crocodiles have some sort of special significance between you two?”

Dave was turning the gigantic plush around, looking at it and waiting for the joke. It had a hole where its asshole would have been, but it was distinctly too big for a smuppet. It was closer to arm-sized, almost like… a regular puppet? “I thought it was an alligator.”

“Well, I don’t know about your brother’s level of knowledge on semiaquatic reptiles, but it has a pointed snout, see?” Jane gave the snout a good squeeze. “Alligators have sort of shovelly snouts, while crocodiles have these cute little pointed ones! So I’d say he’s a crocodile!”

“I guess that makes me the unwitting owner of a red fucking crocodile, then. Whoop-di-fucking-doo. I’m gonna burst into song, I’m so happy. Gonna be like a musical all up in here. Watch me.” He tossed the crocodile onto the other chair in the living room and sank into the couch. “See, I just sang a whole sonata in my head.”

“I would very much like to see you sing a sonata, Dave.” Jane giggled a little and moved the box to the floor, trying to minimize the carnage by gathering its foamy guts back up for it. Of course, without its plush crocodilian heart, it would never be the same.

“You think you caught me being a poser, do you? You think I don’t know what a sonata is just because I’m all about the sick beats? Well let me take you to fucking school, Jane, I’m well aware that there isn’t any singing in a sonata. Just very well-orchestrated burps.”

“I suppose one could mistake a trumpet for a burp, if they were a little bit hard of hearing.”

“Woah woah woah, Jane. You’re going too fast for me. What the fuck is a trumpet?”

“It’s… it’s a twisted brass tube that’s much bigger at one end, and it’s got buttons on it, and when you blow into the little end it makes noise.”

“See, I’m pretty sure you’re making shit up here.”

\---

It was only a little after noon when Dave threw the door to his apartment open and let out a frustrated growl, then nearly slammed it shut behind him. “Goddammit, I can’t believe I got fucking _fired_! I was way too good for the fucking job, and now what? How the fuck am I supposed to buy more cheerios?”

Instead of his usual collapsing on the couch in exhaustion, he threw himself down face first in a fury, limbs spilling off and his face immediately finding a stray packing peanut from the night before.

“Well maybe you just weren’t a very good worker.”

“What the _**FUCK?!**_ ” Dave fell off the couch in his hurry to turn around and nearly took the whole loveseat with him. The noise came vaguely from the direction of the corner of the room where he kept that one sad potted plant that had come with the room which he was never very good about taking care of. Beside it on the floor was his new crocodile puppet, which he wasn’t totally convinced had been sitting there the night before. “Oh my god, did my bro send me a fucking possessed puppet or am I just going delusional?”

“I am not a ‘fucking puppet’. And I’ll bite your hand off if you try.”

“ _Ahhhhhhh_ you fuckers aren’t supposed to _talk_ out of all the creepy fucking shit I saw living in that hellhole I never saw a _talking puppet_ what in the name of Jesus fuck are you doing here and how do I get you the fuck to never-never-gonna-see-you-again land?”

“You’re really jumpy.”

“You’re really dumb!”

“Ouch. You wound me. That was such a sick burn right there, however will I recover.”

Dave slowly and carefully started to shift himself back onto his feet, edging away from the puppet in the process. “You won’t. Ever. My burns are just that sick and you should definitely get the fuck out of here before I lay another one down on your gross puppet ass.”

“You don’t want me to go.” The puppet was still just sitting there, its pointed crocodile snout the only part of it which was moving, making little _Nak_ sounds which, now that Dave was paying closer attention, didn’t really sound like English but definitely didn’t sound unlike English, either. Which he’d definitely make a bigger fucking fuss about if the situation weren’t already pretty weird in infinitely more pressing ways.

So he just watched, unblinking, a little afraid that it would be like one of those stone angel fuckers from Doctor Who, or like one of those fucked-up animatronics from that one horror game. He wasn’t taking his chances; he had trained for this. He edged slowly along while his hand groped behind him under the couch for his trusty least-shitty sword.

“No, _you_ don’t want me to cut you the fuck in half like you’re a piece of fruit and I’m a bored kid from 2010 with his mom’s iPhone.” His fingers finally closed around the hilt of the sword and he swung it in front of him, narrowly avoiding the coffee table.

“One of us two has a job. I’ll give you one guess.”

Dave lowered the sword just slightly. “You’ve got a job? As what, Jeff Dunham’s newest attempt to fight against irrelevance?”

“Come here, stupid human.”

“Slow the fuck down, man, we’re not that close yet. At least buy a girl dinner first.”

“I am not a fucking puppet. Now come.”

“Why should I? You haven’t even pretended to answer my question. We’ve got to get a dialogue going here, bro.”

“I am going to answer it. First you must come.”

“Oh, fine. How many ways can a stupid fucking puppet murder me anyways?” Dave sighed and set his sword down on the coffee table, crossing the room to the little pile of plush that seemed a lot less threatening with the adrenaline clearing out of his system.

“I am not a fucking puppet.”

Dave knelt down in front of the talking red crocodile and looked at it expectantly. “Yeah, yeah, you mentioned. So, what? What the hell did you have me walk all the way over here for?”

“Pick me up.”

Dave leaned back a few inches. “What?”

“Pick me up, human. Use your listening shells.”

Dave opened his mouth to protest but sighed instead and picked the puppet up by the scales down the back of his neck, expecting he was going to have to take it to the couch or something because it couldn’t move its own plush ass around and finding a weird little orange ball where it had been sitting instead.

Before he could say anything, the nakking continued. “Crack the egg.”

“Is this some kind of fucking initiation ritual? I swear to god, if you’re selling my soul right now, there are, like, at least three people that are gonna be really fucking pissed.”

“Crack it!”

“Fine, fine. Jesus.” Dave picked up the egg in his spare hand and rapped it once on the floor, the way Jane had taught except infinitely less sanitary because the crocodile hadn’t been specific and he wasn’t going to eat whatever came out of the puppet ass egg anyways. Instead of anything coming out, though, the second he felt the force start to fracture the shell, everything went a little bit flashy and inside-out.

It was a little reminiscent of the bass dropping, but the entire world was the bass and the song that had once been in his living room was now an entirely different beast. His stomach was also getting in on the dropping action, and at least some of it had to be literal, because he landed ass first on a giant metal gear. It was even more uncomfortably warm than Austin weather, which was hardly surprising considering he didn’t have to look too far to see what was definitely, unmistakably the red-hot, thickly-shifting surface of _fucking lava_ filling the gaps in-between the huge matrix of gears.

Which he was sitting on.

Presumably… maybe a few feet above the lava? How thick could the gears even be? How were the edges not melting? What kind of lame-ass lava couldn’t even melt metal? Or was it, like, steel forged from Superman’s tears and comic book physics?

“Yo, Naks, who’s the tagalong?” A distinctly computerized voice startled Dave’s attention to the space on his other side, where a strange orange ghost was hovering above the slowly-turning gear. His voice was unsettlingly generic, and he didn’t have many visually distinguishing features, either, aside from the tauntingly familiar glasses.

How far had his bro fucking gone with this weird-ass prank? Or training bullshit or whatever the fuck it was.

“He’s a little fleshy pile of shit.” The familiar crocodile-puppet-speech replied from a few feet away, meaning that Dave had lost his grip during the sudden reality shift. Hardly surprising, really.

“I mean, yeah, I can see that, but where did he come from? Who is he?” Dave had the distinct feeling he was being scrutinized by the sheet ghost with glasses. He wasn’t sure it had eyes, but it was a fucking scrutinizing monster.

“He’s here for the boonbucks.”

“Huh. Well, I have got a few jobs. Hey, you, dumbfounded meatsack. The one with all the organs and shit. Can you speak? Are your fleshy skin flaps any good for making noise?”

Dave had to turn a little so he was still properly facing the shades-specter. “Of fucking course I can talk.”

“Good. Can you do anything else?”

“What, like sing? You want me to serenade you?”

“Nah, but I’ve got someone who does. Hold on a moment while I transfer you.” Before the ghost of Microsoft Sam even finished gargling the words, the gear’s turning picked up speed.

“Woah, what the fuck!” Dave shuffled backwards and tensed up, because instincts never were particularly good at physics.

“I said hold still, you jittery rubber asshole!”

“Oh, what the hell. I’m clearly either dead or crazy by now anyways.” Dave forced himself to still and tried everything he could think of to keep himself from slipping off the shiny surface of the gear into the gently glowing molten rock a few yards away.

Before any slipping happened, the world-bass was dropping out again and instead of becoming dizzy and then dead, he found himself landing in an awkward crouch somewhere else completely different. It appeared to be the well-decorated front porch of a massive suburban house, lit by the wrought iron sconces on either side of the door because the sky was already dark.

A man and a small child sat on the porch swing with a book spread between them, and a woman was reclining on chaise lounge, her eyes closed while a small radio on the floor near her head softly played classical music.

The man’s eyes darted up first, the relief quickly sweeping across his face. When the woman looked up and saw her visitors, she was much less pleased. “What’s taken you so long? Do you know that I called in about this an hour ago? It’s past little Casey’s bedtime and we can’t go into our own house!”

Before Dave could suggest they take their excess of money and waltz off to a nice hotel somewhere for the night, the little crocodile stood up and walked between him and the family, which surprised Dave too much to get his words out.

“What’s the problem with the house?”

“There is an ogre taking residence in our garage, making a mess of things, not following proper safety protocols for the use of power tools, everything! He’s a menace and a danger.”

“We can take care of that. Stay here until we come out.”

“Well, I don’t know where else we’re likely to go!” The woman’s face was only getting angrier with everything the crocodile said, to the point that her cheek was starting to twitch. Dave’s apparent coworker didn’t seem to care, though, and just turned to the door, where he waited pointedly with no hope of reaching the door knob.

Dave looked between the little guy and the family a few times before he asked “Uh, do you want us to go through the house, or just straight into the garage?”

“I should hope you weren’t planning on going in and making more of a mess in our house!”

“Uh, right. How do we open the garage, then?”

\-----

Dave and the crocodile stood outside of the garage, door remote in hand, but Dave was hesitant to press the button. “So… what’s the plan here? I didn’t exactly bring my sword along, a little advanced warning there would’ve been nice.”

“The ogre is too strong to fight with pointy sticks.”

“Fucking great. What are we going to do, then, put on a dance? Offer up our asses as tribute?”

“We must lure the ogre a safe distance away or incapacitate it.”

Dave sighed. He didn’t even want to know what a safe distance away would be. Either it would be too close and everyone else would be in trouble, or it would be too far and he’d be thoroughly fucked. “How are we going to do that?”

“It is allergic to music.”

Dave perked up, surprised that it would be that easy. “Wait, really? Well, fuck, let’s go get that woman’s radio.”

“That will not work.”

“What? Why not? Why the fuck not? It was a perfectly good radio, mind the music it was playing was shit, but that’s the thing about radios, they can change station, it’s like magic-”

“Ogres all come from the same stew. They are connected. When one of them hears a song, the rest all develop immunity. No song that has been heard before will do. You told AR you can sing.”

Dave fisted his hands in his hair, totally ruining the only-slightly-frizzy shape it had managed to keep all day. “That was a joke, I can’t fucking-” Dave shook his head and took a deep breath, then pulled out his phone and started pressing frantically. “Okay, song that’s never been heard before. I can do that. Brand new, unlike anything else. Can you gimme a couple of those naks right into the microphone?”

\-----

The crocodile pressed the button on the remote with his nose while Dave continued to nervously fiddle with his phone, which he was hunched around like he was trying to protect it from rain. The garage door slid slowly open, and in the brief glances up that Dave took as the opening widened, he saw flashes of complete chaos, everything thrown about the floor and greased with gooey splotches of a thick black oil like tar. When the gap was wide enough, Dave could even see the shuffling actively happening inside, and soon enough, the hulking, oily mass that was causing it.

The ogre was a fucking giant, broad-shouldered with a threateningly bad set of dentistry, including some tusks suspiciously reminiscent of a mustache. It seemed to be made entirely of gelatinized crude oil.

Dave immediately pressed the play button on his iPhone, and the track he’d been mixing started to play. It was safe, standard, entirely the result of nerves getting to him under pressure with the occasional nak in time with the beat setting it apart from anything else someone made when they were first figuring out GarageBand. And it just seemed to annoy the ogre, who looked up like it was onto their scheme and wouldn’t be felled so easily.

Okay, so the occasional nak in the middle of the track wasn’t enough to make it a new song. Got it. Time to actually mix something. He could do this. He had, in fact, mixed a fair amount of music in his day. He could do this. His life was depending on his ability to do this, so he could do it.

His finger swiped frantically over the screen, dropping out the drum to replace it with puppet crocodile noises and pushing things around so they weren’t quite so regular. The ogre was just standing up when Dave’s fumbling fingers hit the play button again, and when a complete cacophany came out of his phone’s poor speakers, it fucking _grinned_.

“You’re a picky son of a fuck, you know that? Like, I get that it’s bad, but it still totally counts as music!”

“If you cannot make music, you should have said so, stupid human!”

“Oh, hold onto your fucking puppet tits. Or ass, or whatever you’ve got you can get a handful of. I’m trying to focus here!” Dave gritted his teeth and tried to take deep breaths. He just had to focus. His music didn’t have to be _good_ , it just had to be _new_ and _music_. He could do that. He’d done it before. Hell, he could do it when he was twelve.

He made himself take his time and held his finger as steady as he could, even with the sound of the ogre’s squishy, thundering footsteps as he slowly made his way over to eat them alive or whatever in the background. All he needed to beat the thing was one finger. Just the one finger and his years of practice and--and that would have to do.

Dave pressed play for the third time, and what came out of the speakers this time was passable. It was pretty synth-heavy, but it started out with some cool, mellow echo effects before the bass dropped and there were naks all over the place. He’d played with the effects on them a bit, so they weren’t just the weirdly soft-but-sharp bursts they had been in the previous two plays. For a first pass pre-tweaking, it worked surprisingly well.

And the ogre’s changing face confirmed that. It snarled around its mustache-tusks, suddenly shuddering like it didn’t know how to stay together anymore. Dave turned up the volume, and it made his shitty phone speakers crackle a little bit, but that didn’t matter. Their foe was looking more blob-like and less threat-shaped by the second.

Naks did some weird flash-stepping around as the thing was losing cohesion, collecting up a few gem-like things from the wreckage and dumping them in a pile at Dave’s feet.

“Good, you’re not totally useless. We’ll need to remove these and the oil. It will reassemble, but if we take the proper precautions, it will take a while.”

Dave looked warily at the oil-slicked garage as his song faded out, his racing heart just starting to remember that slower was an option. “Dude, there’s got to be a better way to do this.”

“We are just temp workers. Our job is to do what we’re told.”

“I think we could do what we’re told in a way that _sucks a little less_.”

\-----

After a third world-shift (he was kinda sorta starting to get used to the them, the way one might get used to having to squeeze through an opening much too small for them), Dave collapsed on the couch in exhaustion, even more thoroughly worn out than the Dave yesterday could ever have imagined.

“Half of this is yours.”

When Dave looked over, both his partner in ogre-extermination and a small pile of cash were sitting on the table. The sight of the money made him perk up just a little. He reached over to pull out half of the stack, and when he counted it out, it… actually wasn’t too terrible for the night’s work. Certainly better rates than he’d ever gotten working retail or clean-up crew.

“So… do you have a name, weird crocodile puppet?”

“I have been called Nakodile.”

Dave nodded and then planted his face firmly back in the couch cushion. “So that’s why glasses called you Naks.”

“Do you have a moniker, human?”

Dave readjusted himself on the couch so that he could look at Nakodile better. “My name’s Dave. Strider.”

There was a knocking at the door right then, quickly followed by Jane’s best motherly voice. “Dave? Are you home yet? Did you ever actually get to the grocery store or were you just planning on being a hoodlum and mooching all of my hard-earned food?”

“Uh… yeah, I got paid today, so I meant to go out, but I… forgot.”

Jane sighed. “Oh, will you just let me in, then?”

“Yeah, hold up.” With some effort, Dave managed to propel himself off the couch in the general direction of the door, which he then managed to open for Jane.

Jane looked a little surprised when she was actually faced with a standing Dave opening the door for her. “When did you get back in?”

“A little bit ago. I’ve just been chilling here in the living room, thinking about how much of a hungry asshole I am.”

“Huh. I didn’t hear you get back.” Jane’s eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t look like she was going to press the matter at the moment. Not until Dave had some food in him, at least.

“You know me. Bro trained these ninja feet himself. No one can step as quiet as the Striders. No one.”

“Dave, have you still not even put that puppet anywhere since yesterday? You know you’d be much better off if you actually bothered to do things when they bother you!”

Dave glanced back over his shoulder at Nakky on the table, who made no noise in response. Somehow he wasn’t surprised. Nak’s half of the money had also vanished off the coffee table, which made Dave briefly reevaluate his earlier tossing out of the blinking angel theory.

He turned back to Jane after a moment. “Actually, I think the guy is starting to grow on me. It was clearly a sweet gift my bro gave from the very most ironic depths of his heart. The cold, cold depths. I do think we should take care of that food thing, though.”

Jane rolled her eyes and then started walking back towards her door. “Come on, you lazy bum. We need to fatten you up before you disappear into nothing!”

“See, when you make references back to my jokes about cannibalism, you don’t exactly inspire confidence. On that note, what are you going to be using to fatten me up, exactly? Did it have 'soylent' in the name, by any chance?”


End file.
